Love him or hate him, and barring an assassin's bullet, Hugo Chavez Frias IS Venezuela's President until 2012

VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: It is not in any way a defense of armed conflict, terrorism or atrocities, but the general misconception of Colombia's domestic political strife and its regrettable overlapping into neighboring Venezuela is the sort of stuff that has US State Department propagandists jumping in ecstatic glee when they can foist THEIR version of events on a gullible world with the help of the Associated Press, Reuters and FOX News et.al.

The first thing to recognize is that in the ebbing days of George W. Bush's catastrophic presidency of the United States, one of his favorite buddies in the South American continent has always been Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velaz ... at least as long as US funding stays in place and the free flow of Colombian-produced cocaine continues to North America and Europe, conveniently (for propaganda purposes) smuggled through neighboring Venezuela.

Let's think for a moment what would happen if Venezuela were to build an impenetrable electrified and razor-wired, Berlin Wall along all 1,400 miles (2,200 km) of its often mountainous and jungle-covered border with Colombia!

• Do you really think it would call a halt on one-way (i.e. Colombia to Venezuela) drug operations where armed-to-the-teeth Rambos from US Special Forces have already failed so miserably despite the $ millions pumped in to support the scarcely democratic Uribe regime in Bogota?

Yet North American print media like the Wall Street Journal and its sidekicks at Fox News and CNN focus almost exclusively on denying their own and Colombia's incapacity to deal with the supremely more inventive United Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) despite more than FORTY YEARS of conflict with the communist rebels who most definitely decide over more territory in Colombia than either Uribe's government or its' extremist right-wing terrorist-paramilitary AUC forces!

FAIR COP INDEED! Phooey! Don't tell United States readers or viewers of the basic fact that the successive governments of Venezuela have for at least the last couple of decades sought to act as international mediators between the FARC/ELN and Bogota/AUC ... an international attempt at mediation that began very much BEFORE Venezuela's current President Hugo Chavez Frias appeared on USA radars even as early as February 1992 when he led an attempted coup d'etat against corrupt President Carlos Andres Perez (CAP) who, after another an attempted coup d'etat (November 1992) and presidential impeachment the following year (1993),was finally jailed for multi-million $ corruption.

The United States of America conveniently forgets that it propped up Perez' quasi-dictatorship through a military atrocity (February 29, 1989) against his own people in which hundreds died and many more were seriously wounded.

The United States of America conveniently forgets that Carlos Andres Perez was even more of a (admittedly fair-weather) friend to Cuba's then not-so-geriatric Fidel Castro Ruz throughout his (Perez') money-grabbing career in Venezuelan politics and, now, in his latter years, provides safe haven for CAP in his various luxury residences in New York and Miami to name just two.

Venezuelans, Latinos have struggled for most of their history to achieve democracy without the imprint of either Spanish or USAmerican imperialism.

Yes, I know the word "imperialism" is a concept that is rarely understood within US borders, but it is nevertheless a 'cringe factor' around the world where independent sovereign nations have seen their autonomy crushed by the Bush dynasty and its predecessors' jackboots. Most times, the US "imperialists" have been hand in glove with domestic "compradores" (those who are prepared to sell their country for a Judas shekel of silver), otherwise many believe South America could have achieved its social, economic and political dreams a long time ago.

Argentina's Peron was discredited, Che Guevara was killed, Cuba supposedly contained by easily circumvented USA embargoes, Arbenz overthrown and murdered, Chile's Salvatore Allende assassinated, Daniel Ortega's Sandinista government overthrown bloodily by Oliver North's Contras and Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador and others embroiled "dirty war" at USA's behest. Latin America has experienced more than 160 coup d'etats (or attempts at such) while the United States has presented itself to the world as a benevolent protector of its own backyard.

The United States has maintained its own self-satisfying (dare we day hegemonic!) control of elite-dominated regimes (Pinochet's Chile is but one example) by force of economic and military means. Those countries (Venezuela et.al.), that have opted for democratic socialism, struggling against neo-liberal servitude, are in a struggle to survive against the full force of monetary terrorism typified by the Carnegie Institute and the Bush dynasty's aspirations for world domination.

Latin America has been struggling to find its way out of a Monroe Doctrine psychiatric imposition which has imbued a special brand of inferiority complex across the nations, and self-doubt ... a sense of powerlessness and apathy ... but now we're witnessing serious trouble in the USA's backyard as the grassroots masses of Latinos begin to recognize the disease inflicted upon them from the North. and are now trying radical remedies to eradicate the imposition of extreme poverty in Latin America.

Today more than a third of South Americans live in poverty where the rich compradores (less than 10% of the total population) sit astride enormous wealth that could/should properly be used to the benefit of everyone.

Of course, it is a useful distraction for the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to waste their time ruminating on how FARC and ELN rebels move swiftly to and from over unprotected Venezuela-Colombia jungle borders as though a GPS signal can determine culpability of some unnamed border commission official in faraway Caracas or better still blame allegedly-communist dictator Hugo Chavez Frias for US Special Forces and Colombia's own patent failures at containment.

Not to say, however, that local warlords in the border badlands on both sides of the borders are NOT in cahoots with one side or the other to profit largely from the provision of illegal arms, ammunition and landlocked chandlery to whomsoever has the ready cash to pay. It's not to say that the FARC And/or ELN are any the less organized at breaching national borders than their blood-curdling counterparts in the AUC or the official Colombian Army, but, for faraway media in New York and Washington to do their masters' bidding and exculpate the real rogues of this long-standing drama by foisting the blame on Hugo Chavez Frias, is but a diversion from the real nitty-gritty of what he (Chavez) should be doing to make efficient his own machinery of government to meet the democratic necessities imposed now by clear changes in Venezuela's domestic political profile.

Love him or hate him, and barring an assassin's bullet, Hugo Chavez Frias IS Venezuela's President until 2012.

...and, while the good people of the United States are forced to live with the last remnants of a Bush presidency through January 2009, there is indeed a small glimmer of hope that the WSJ and Fox can possibly regain their senses and get the world into something other than far right perspective.

...or is any hope of that eventuality already dead and gone?

Roy S. Carson
vheadline@gmail.com

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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

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